Reading Matters

Doug Wilhelm is a full-time writer and an independent publisher in Weybridge, Vemont. His 13 novels for young adults include The Revealers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), which has been the focus of reading-and-discussion projects in well over 1,000 middle schools; its sequel, True Shoes (Long Stride Books, 2012), and Doug's newest book, The Prince of Denial (Long Stride, 2013).

When my YA novel The Revealers was just breaking through, a friend in Montpelier, Vermont, where I’d lived for many years, asked if I would write about the experience for The Bridge, the state capitol's local paper. I asked if I could interview myself, and if it could get testy. So ...

How much longer do you plan on exploiting your pathetic childhood for personal gain?That’s your first question? That’s how you want to start?

School Library Journal’s February issue has a big feature on the rise of small presses and self-publishing, and what this means to librarians. The article’s essence: there’s a big and growing flow of fresh books from non-mainstream sources. And librarians, though often open by nature to new possibilities, are challenged to sort through everything and dig out the good stuff.

Fair enough. But the article’s headline capsulizes the challenge that faces the people, such as me, who’ve taken to producing books independently. The head: “Fringe Factor.” Its implication: do we really have to wade through all this junk?

“I started out with nothing, and I’ve still got most of it left.” That old Vermont saying pretty much captures the career I've had, myself, as a full-time, self-employed writer up here for over 30 years. Not complaining; but in the bleakness of winter, I have been reflecting. Has it been worth it? Is it still?

One of the funniest things on the web — it’s been on there for several years; this is not a late-breaking news blog — is the list of “leaked” tour demands that Steve Martin posted on his website when he was touring with his bluegrass group, the Steep Canyon Rangers. The whole thing is hilarious, but the part I remembered, when I went looking for the piece this week, is this:

It’s hard not to feel despair, isn’t it? The massacre in Paris is an assault on free expression everywhere; I’m afraid the same will prove true of the big-money takeover of Congress. Today I woke up to read that a father threw his five-year-old daughter off a bridge in St. Petersburg. It’s January, it’s deeply cold in New England, and it’s hard to see the way.

The front cover is long gone, as is the Santa who popped up when you opened the book, lost with most memories of our long-ago Christmas Eves. That golden spine is still there, chipped and worn to cardboard in places, but there. So is the story that was special to me, about the boy who didn’t deserve a Christmas.

You don’t often see a middle-school author visit described in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” but this was Russell Brand, the British comedian, film star, Fox News lambaster, self-styled revolutionary, and now, okay, YA author. Brand’s retelling of the Pied Piper story was published last month, as the first in his new “Trickster Tale” series — and he told the magazine that this story, as he frames it, is about revolution.

Every year at this time of year I spend two days with the eighth grade at Whitehall (NY) Central School, where every student, alone or in small teams, creates a new or extended scene for my book The Revealers. Each year this is one of the richest projects I get to be part of. English teacher Sue Ringer and I have done it for eight years now, and we’ve gotten better at drawing these new scenes out of the full range of kids. The work they did this week was the best I’ve seen so far.

Each year I visit the Main Street Middle School, a good school in Montpelier, Vt. where the sixth grade reads The Revealers, and it’s a well-planned highlight of my travels — but this year there was a twist. I'd stayed, the night before, with friends close to Montpelier, and in the morning we opened the daily paper to find, front-page news, that Jeff Kinney, author of the ginormous Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, had been in Montpelier the day before. Visiting ... the Main Street Middle School.

When I visit middle schools I often get asked, “What was your first book?” I say, well, the first book I wrote was rejected 75 times and never published — but the first one I got published was the one Ray Montgomery didn’t have time to write.

The website Bookbub.com has a piece up called “6 Beautiful Libraries You Need to Visit Right Now.” I visited the site, at least, and beheld the images of stunning large libraries like Boston Public, George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins, and the Seattle Central Library, a glass-sheathed, very angular architectural statement that says something, though I don’t think it’s “library.” But anyway.

The libraries I’ve loved have tended — I realize this just now — to be not very attractive, appearance-wise. I think of the metal-shelved catacombs that fill the dim-lit, below-ground floors of Baker Library at Dartmouth College, and the chairs of molded plastic that made me feel like I was back home at the American Library in Kathmandu, where I taught English across the street many years ago, and tried to get the writing of my first book started. But the place where I made the deepest connection with what libraries can mean was, probably, the least lovely of all. It was damp and borderline moldy, in fact.

I’m so tired of all the pointless noise and digitized chatter around us — I just want to read books that matter, that make a real connection.

For example, I pulled from my shelf this week an old blue Crest Book paperback novel, The Night in Lisbon. This is by Erich Maria Remarque, the German author better known for the World War I story All Quiet on the Western Front, but I remembered reading Lisbon some years ago and being very struck by it. The story deals with two refugees who meet on the waterfront in Portugal’s capital in 1942, when, as the narrator says, “every ship was an ark.”

When it comes to writing, a middle schooler emailed this week, do you kinda set goals? As in do you tell yourself to write a chapter or maybe a page for the idea you have created or do you just write it?

They say that admitting you’ve got a problem is the first step toward recovery. And this week I’ve discovered: I have a problem. I’m calling it Reading ADD — but it might as well be called the online disease.

We are losing our minds to distraction, to links and pings and popups — and slow reading may be among the best, most available answers.

This is very much what “slow food” is to fast food: something more real and reviving than a drive-through convenience that you consume while doing other stuff, and that really, if we're honest, makes us feel kind of crappy. When you read the way we’re all reading these days — scanning for better options, hopping into links, stopping every 10 minutes to check messages or answer texts — you wind up with an unsettled mind that hasn’t absorbed much but can’t seem to stop. This is no better for the inner system than a Doritos Locos Taco.

Thanks to a very successful Kickstarter campaign that raised the funds for publication, my newest book, Treasure Town — my first title for younger readers — will be published in April. Advance reader copies are going out this fall to review journals, book bloggers, and others.

An eighth grader named Angel asked me this, earlier this week in the library (okay, the media center) of Roselle Middle School in Roselle, Illinois. At that moment the room was filled with the school’s eighth grade, all sitting on the floor. I thought about Angel's question for a second and then said, “An act of faith.” But there are a lot of other sentences I could have come up with just as well.

Blurb.com is a business started 10 years ago by Internet entrepreneur, photographer and avid reader Eileen Gittins. She wanted to create and print 40 copies of a book, with her photographs and writeups of 40 people Gittins had worked with. She didn’t have the skills to design a book, but she had money to pay. She couldn’t find a service that would do that — so she started one.